REVIEW: Limpid Pools of Prose (and Blood) - on Poor Damned Souls by Charlene Elsby
Emma Reed Jones on Elsby's prose and the gradual sharpening of the narrator's consciousness.
In her recent writing workshop, titled Psychodemonics, Charlene Elsby proposed the act of writing as a kind of focused, experiential tracking – training one’s attention on a phenomenon and holding as close to it as possible as it unfolds on the page. She also linked this idea of tracking to the phenomenological method of epoche or eidetic (meaning “formal”) reduction, developed by philosopher Edmund Husserl in the 1910s. Epoche is essentially a kind of thought experiment that isolates what gives a particular experience its unique shape or form in consciousness. It works by “bracketing out” the aspects or contents of the mind that are incidental, thus “reducing” the experience to its essence.
Like Elsby, I was trained in academic philosophy, and her articulation of this intellectual link helped me to pinpoint one of the most striking features of her prose, present throughout Poor Damned Souls (Merigold Independent, 2026): the curious internal monologue of her narrators. The narrator of Poor Damned Souls is not exactly featureless. She comes from somewhere; she is female; important details of her personal history emerge. But Elsby’s prose does indeed have the focused, reduced quality of epoche: it is stripped of external signifiers of identity, cultural discourse, and most importantly judgment. Instead, the reader encounters an assemblage of thoughts in which no one is necessarily privileged over another. There is no apparent moral censorship, justification, or attempt to actively mold a narrative – there are only the truths being tracked. This narrative style recalls these words of Clarice Lispector: “The moment of living is…Hellishly inexpressive”; “[i]t is a nothingness that…has no taste”. Elsby’s writing is not “voicey,” though it still has a brutally strong presence. The prose is clear and without taste, like water: limpid pools left to still themselves, so that the narrator’s thoughts can float to the surface like found objects. Or dead bodies.
All of this to say that in Poor Damned Souls the narrator’s inner monologue is the opposite of self-censoring and neurotic, which, regrettably, seems to be the usual mode of communication in this day and age. I suppose in contrast we could call Poor Damned Souls (refreshingly) uncensored and perverse, or even psychotic, in the sense of having dissolved at least some of the boundary between the conscious and unconscious dimensions of experience.
The primary experience being tracked in the text is the dawning consciousness of betrayal. Poor Damned Souls is billed as a novel about infidelity, but infidelity constitutes only one of the many layers of betrayal explored. Even prior to learning that her husband, Scott, is engaging in secretive behaviors on sex and fetish apps, the narrator reflects on his deeper, more ontological betrayal – the way that he held her in mind when courting her (waxing poetic about how they would, together, transcend the conditions of their mundane lives and dead-end jobs) only to drop her from his mind soon thereafter, no longer viewing her as a real, separate being. Instead, she becomes the backdrop to his existence: the mechanism for heating his dinners, the receptacle for his boring 7-10 minute fucks in the evening, and the witness to his circular discourse about how he’s gonna strike it rich one day by inventing an app.
Etc., ad nauseam.
Then there’s the narrator’s workplace setting: a check cashing facility. This is one of the novel’s most brilliant aspects. The metaphors abound. The narrator’s marriage, see above, is of course a bad check that can’t be cashed. Her life is borrowed against a future that doesn’t exist. Prior to her discovery of Scott’s extracurricular activities, the narrator measures out her life in coffee spoons, 10-minute fucks, and 15-minute periods during which the timed safe at the check cashing facility locks and unlocks. Working-class life is a series of exploitations in which she seeks familiar, momentary, and fairly unsatisfying pleasures. Elsby’s writing shines: she carefully documents procedural steps, both in the workplace and in the home, like no other. In one of my favorite scenes, the narrator describes step-by-step the preparation of a bag of pre-made Caesar salad (the “stupid middle class fancy salad” her husband demands): “Pour the lettuce into a bowl and then open the inner packet with all of the other packets inside. [...] Everything in its own ridiculous little package, emptied one by one, making sure the little triangles of plastic pulled off of them didn’t end up in the bowl” (pg. 56). Elsby applies this procedural tracking mechanism to all subjects equally – masturbation, salad making, waking up in a pool of period blood and dealing with that, spying on your husband’s internet usage, cracking a skull, moving a dead body – illuminating how the gestures by which one accomplishes any mundane task are the same ones that have power over life and death.
The narrator’s awareness of betrayal collides with and illuminates this mundane, circular, dead-end world, waking her up to all the prior betrayals she has experienced in life. Her dawning awareness of Scott having killed women takes it a step further. Most interestingly, the narrator ultimately concludes that the key betrayal here is not that her husband has fucked and killed, it is that he has done it without imagination – and further, that he has excluded her. For a moment, she imagines the act of murder could join them together, revive their marriage. I was reminded of Bataille’s Story of the Eye (e.g., “Simone was still a virgin, and I fucked her for the first time, next to the corpse”). Perhaps a new marriage could be born beside the corpse of bourgeois morality (I thought, trying to be clever)? But Bataille’s story is situated in the world of childhood perversions, and Elsby’s is decidedly not. If anything, Elsby’s narrator is parentified while her husband is a man-child. His primary transgressions, she ultimately and repeatedly concludes, are underestimating her and lacking ambition. She wants to join in, to stand beside him viewing the same landscape of meaning and opportunity, but finds herself repeatedly marginalized. For example:
Why did he think I had to be excluded from his activities? Was it because he didn’t think of me as a real partner, as a real friend? Once during one of our card games, [Scott’s friend] Brad came out with this story, how back in high school he’d found some slut, taken her out to a field, and he and one of his friends both fucked her. Because friends share, and there was enough to go around. I wondered if I’d made a mistake, going into heterosexuality, with this knowledge that men and women can’t be friends - not the kind who fuck sluts in the field together. Not the dumb and profound way Brad described it.
This passage, for me, is at the heart of this book: the narrator’s rage is targeted at the inability to penetrate the homosocial bond between those who are partners in something, whether it’s manhood, middle class belonging, “desirability” as a woman, or some other category that forms an unthought backdrop for its inhabitants. She wants to be a subject, not an object. To fuck sluts in a field together, not because she really wants to fuck them (the narrator explains, sadly, that she has been unable to really enjoy fucking women in the past); but because it is a way to be the doer and not the done-to. As Elsby ratchets up the intensity, she seeks, as she has in other books, to dismantle the human body (the whole human project?) in a mad quest to find the lines between good and bad, rich and poor, master and slave, subject and object.
The gradual sharpening of the narrator’s consciousness gives the text the character of an evolution – I think of those images that depict the human evolving slowly from the ape – and by the end, you could say the narrator reaches for, or even achieves, a state of transcendence beyond those images. When we get to the ultraviolence, reserved for the end, the images it brought to mind were primarily from Tetsuo the Iron Man, which my roommate made me watch back in 2010, and which is forever seared into my consciousness now, for better or worse. The narrator asks, how does consciousness emerge? Who gets access to the world? To objects? Who gets to assume what, and why? And who takes control of a story? But of course, she asks these questions with a knife, a hammer, a power drill, and other implements.
In the end, I went back to the beginning, and found this passage which, for me, says it all. The narrator is reflecting on a cautionary tale told in her workplace about a woman who once failed to lock up the 15-minute safe and how robbers came and stole over $100k:
They never said what happened to her, because they didn’t care. Maybe she got fired. Maybe she kept working there and got a write up for her first strike, not locking up the 15-minute safe. Maybe they stuffed her into the safe when they left, and she suffocated in there, unable to press the emergency button back up at the till, her body discovered hours later by the next person to take over the shift. It wasn’t the point of the story to know” (pg. 13, emphasis mine).
Works Referenced
Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. City Lights: 1967.
Elsby, Charlene. Poor Damned Souls. Merigold Independent, 2026.
Lispector, Clarice. The Passion According to G.H. Trans. Ronald W. Sousa. University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Emma Reed Jones writes poetry and prose shaped by a love of experimental literature, punk culture, and philosophy, in which she holds a PhD. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in Hobart and Vlad Mag as well as academic outlets. She is the author of a 2023 philosophy book, Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Find her @emma_reed_writes on Instagram.